Working mainly in video and sculpture, Ron Lambert investigates the intersection between psychology and the environment. He received his MFA from the School of Art and Design at Alfred University, and his BFA from the University of Connecticut. Ron is currently an assistant professor at Bloomsburg University. Ron’s work has been published in Shaping Space, Third Edition, and Color, Third Edition, both by Paul Zelanski as well as the show catalogue People Doing Strange Things With Electricity. Ron has shown in galleries nationally, including the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Georgia, Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, Lexington Art League, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut, and several college and university galleries around the country. His videos have been screened internationally including the Crosstalk Video Festival in Budapest Hungary, and the Sanluan Yishu project in Beijing China. Ron’s work has won awards at Artworks Gallery in Hartford, Connecticut, and the Foundry Art Centre in St. Charles, Missouri. His work is in the Vascovitz collection, and in the collection of the Tacoma Art Museum. He is currently represented by Catherine Person Gallery in Seattle, WA.

He has exhibited his video installations and live a/v performances nationally and internationally, including the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, the BEA Festival for Media Arts in Las Vegas, Electronic Language International Festival FILE: Rio de Janeiro 2009 and FILE: Såo Paulo 2008.

Josh Gumiela is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Austin Peay State University. His work often combines low and high technology with natural elements to create immersive interactive media installations and environments. He’s interested in themes of postmemory, diaspora, and displacement as well as matters of time and timelessness, privacy, open source culture, and the deconstruction/repurposing of archaic, discarded, and ubiquitous technology.

Water slowly drips from a dilapidated ceiling and falls into a worn metal pan. The sound of each droplet hitting the pan is scattered into rhythmic echoes of the initial event. As more and more droplets are collected–no two events sound exactly alike–the sound gradually crescendos to a cacophonous cadence representing the inexorable march of decay and the human wish to ‘go back and do it again.’

The installation resets itself every few minutes, setting the stage for a new cycle that is always different from the one before. The sound is controlled by an MSP patch that recalls the sounds of the prior droplets and disrupts the rhythm each time a new drop hits the pan. Four speakers positioned in the room envelop the beholder in spatialized sound.

DeleopolisVideo and programming, 2013
10:00

Deleopolis is a video installation that explores the decay and detritus of architecture and urban infrastructure.

EntomogoriaVideo and programming, 2013
7:42

Entomogoria uses abstract images of insects to playfully discover the precarious space that exists between fear and euphoria of the natural and increasingly technological world.

Angela Washko ( a Terminal Award winner )is a New York based artist and facilitator devoted to mobilizing communities and creating new forums for discussions of feminism where they do not exist. These forums are created through actions, interventions, videos, and performances- sometimes in video games. She recently founded the Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft.

Terminal and the Center of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University are pleased to announce the launch of Drawing Circuits by Gottfried Haider. Haider is a recipient of a 2013 – 2014 Terminal Award. The Terminal Award is granted annually to four artists to help in the creation of new internet based artworks.

Drawing Circuits is a website that guides users to draw (electrical) circuit boards using their mouse or trackpad to free draw. Drawing Circuits juxtaposes the practice of drawing with the creation of circuitry. Haider is dealing with the largely hidden and undervalued nature of electronics in contemporary media art contexts. The site functions both as a facilitator for an experience, as well as a tool for the creation of circuit boards. The experience includes imagery, music and interventions, that bring elements from a drawing studio into the website. As a tool, the website allows users to export their drawings in a way that they can be easily machined into real copper clad boards ( using a CNC mill or a vinyl cutter).

Gottfried Haider is a media artist born in Vienna. He studied Digital Arts at Vienna University of Applied Arts before joining UCLA’s Design Media Arts program on a Fulbright Scholarship. His work was awarded an Award of Distinction (2nd place) at Prix Ars Electronica 2004.

Heather D. Freeman is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte where she teaches digital print, animation, video, installation and drawing. She grew in Skillman, New Jersey and was heavily influenced by her parents’ careers in the sciences. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art and German Studies from Oberlin College and an MFA in Studio Art from Rutgers University. Previously, Freeman worked as an art director, graphic designer, editor and animator in New York and New Jersey. She also taught art, graphic design and visual rhetoric since 2001 at various institutions including the University of Kentucky and Clemson University. Her work is regularly exhibited regionally and nationally and has appeared in international exhibitions in Canada, China, Cuba, Germany, Hungary, New Zealand, Sweden and Thailand. More of her work can be viewed at EpicAnt.com and PersonalDemons.org.

Statement:

I was always interested in the language and symbolic forms of science and where these intersect with mythic, religious and popular iconographies. With the birth of my son Quinn in 2008, this interest shifted to the linguistic growth of children. As a two-year-old, my son’s language skills went through a developmental explosion, and I found myself cataloguing his verbal discoveries. I reinterpreted my son’s language-defined worldview by taking his interests (trucks, dinosaurs, owls, playgrounds, etc.) and translating them into my own concerns (sustainable energy, ecological diversity, social justice, etc.) These became portraits of my son’s shifting Weltanschauung.

My son’s language skills metamorphose as he grows. As his ability to express the world matures, so accrue his fascinations, from construction equipment to video games, from monsters to death. As his relationship to a complex society matures, my relationships as a mother also evolve.

I find myself investigating old interests (science, human history, popular culture) through the lens of motherhood, with all its self-doubts, flailing, and absurdity contrasted with deep assurance. My son’s growth constantly re-defines motherhood for me, just as the changing nature of childhood re-shapes my investigations of the non-familial world.

Jonathan Rattner is a lens-based artist who primarily produces experimental nonfiction film and videos. His material usually consists of fragmentary images of the everyday, which are reassembled into unexpected configurations in an effort to draw attention to the forgotten, the ignored, the banal, and the unseen. In his work, Rattner seeks to offer an open and elastic aesthetic experience that reimagines our physical and temporal landscape and invites viewers to interact with what they see and to create meaning by reflecting on their own experiences, ideas, and truths.

end, end, end: 2013

8 minutes, 45 seconds

end, end, end is a cinematic essay about the dying of a loved one, inability to make coffee, and the desire to remember things that have been forgotten. It is a work woven around a found audio recording of an American Poet using his voice to mark, in various ways, the beginning and end of his analog audio reels.

FOR ISSA: 2012 video

11 minutes, 14 seconds

A travelogue composed as a series of visual haikus in the spirit of 19th century Japanese poet and wanderer Issa. Through a distillation of impressions, the haiku poets of Issa’s time sought to express moments in a crystallized state. In order to capture experience as a unity and totality, the haiku structure consisted of two elements: the first represented the object, condition, or situation; the second represented perception. The desired result was a nexus of self and world.

Footage for this work was gathered over a two year period from various locations, including Thailand, Japan, New York, Iowa, Oregon and Tennessee.

Recently, art critic Jerry Saltz attended a six hour Jay-Z performance art piece cum music video shoot and made the following observation: “Does every celebrity have to turn into a performance-art marathoner?” The move from celebrity to endurance performance artist seems sensible to me. Celebrities (musicians, actors, athletes) are already performing, but mere performance is just entertainment. How to make entertainment into art? Just do the same thing longer.

Of course, some “entertainers” also have craft skills other than music or acting. David Lynch, for instance, has movie directing skills and painting skills. So what makes Tilda Swinton or Milla Jovovich lying in a box for a day any more or less quality art (or art at all) than authentic performance artist Chris Burden lying in a box for a day? Well, it’s not the professional quality of the box lying. Chris Burden doesn’t lie a better box.

actress Tilda Swinton lying in a box

Quality endurance performance art seems to have to do with (at least) three criteria:

Is the piece part of a larger conceptual trajectory that the artist is pursuing? In other words, does it connect outward into other media or other concepts in the world (concepts other than the concept of a person sitting in a box for a long time).

Does the piece cost the performer something, or is it a relatively facile thing to accomplish? [MTAA’s 1 Year Performance Video is an ingenious, media-aware critique of this rule.]

And finally, related to these first two, but least concrete of all, does the piece produce some sort of magic? Does the endurance performance lead to something beyond what it merely is, or is it merely a person lying in a box?

Endurance performance art is to art what poetry is to writing — anybody can do it at all, but it’s tricky to do it in ways that matter. Just because endurance performance art is a cliche ’60s trope doesn’t mean there aren’t still great endurance performances yet to be enacted. Heck, painting is a cliche ’50s trope, and plenty of people still paint.

Regarding criterias #1 [does it have conceptual merit?] and #3 [is it more than a sum of its parts?], it seems celebrities venturing into performance art are hoping that the “magic” of their celebrity aura will be enough to win the day, make the project magical, and tie the project into conceptual topics larger than the project itself. But the munging up of art worlds and fame is a boring conceptual topic to me. Of course a bunch of art world nerds are going to be starstruck by a performer like Jay-Z. It would be like if Brad Pitt got cast to play Wittgenstein in a Hollywood film about Wittgenstein (implausible, but bear with me), and then he came to a graduate philosophy class to give a lecture on the philosophy of Wittgenstein. All the students would think it was real cool, but it probably wouldn’t be the best lecture on Wittgenstein. The difference is, art has no real boundaries, and “celebrity” is a perfectly legitimate conceptual topic for art, and so Jay-Z is not a fake endurance performance artist. He is “legitimate,” but only because anyone is legitimate. The more relevant contemporary question is not, “Is it legitimate art?,” but rather, “How does it matter in the world?”

Regarding criteria #2 [what does it cost the performer?], I don’t think lying in a box all day costs anybody much. I’m not arguing for the re-skilling of artists or that “craft” become the new criteria for what makes something valuable. Indeed, endurance performance art is cool explicitly because it’s this crazy brute force medium where you don’t have to be “good” at something. But you should at least have to be “stupid” or “brutish” or “stubborn” enough at something for it to spark some kind of magic. I am reminded of the words of King David, when one of his subjects offered him a free field in which to sacrifice an offering to God: “No, I insist on paying the full price. I will not take for the Lord what is yours, or sacrifice a burnt offering that costs me nothing” (I Chronicles 21:24). So, call me old fashioned, but I think endurance performance art should cost the performer something. My earliest models for endurance performance art were COUM Transmissions (proto-Throbbing Gristle), and the rank outsider GG Allin (whose final performance after-party literally killed him, or so the legend goes). And of course the Viennese Actionists, who weren’t fooling around.

According to criteria #2, Andrew WK’s recent 24-hour drum marathon qualifies as quality endurance performance art. Yes, he is also a musician celebrity, but he was an authentic performance artist before (and during) both of those things. The 24-hour drum-athon is actually MTV pop celebrity getting hijacked by performance art, whereas Jay-Z filming a music video with a bunch of New York art people in a Manhattan gallery is merely performance art getting hijacked by MTV pop celebrity. The former is better.

“musician(?)” Andrew WK having played the drums for almost 24 consecutive hours

By way of confession, my own art practice dips into the realms of endurance performance art. Sometimes “new media” is added, so that it’s not “just” endurance performance art ( http://deepyoung.org/current/again/ AND http://deepyoung.org/current/doubleblind/ ). But other times, it’s just plain old endurance performance art ( http://lab404.com/video/pop/ ). As a performer, I am always able to cause myself to have some kind of “magical” experience. It seems the real challenge is enabling others to have that same experience. Perhaps it has to cost them something. I am reminded of the wonderful Lydia Lunch quote: “What could be better than to die for your art… TO DIE FOR MY ART.. Now we’re talking.”

Regarding criteria #3 [the “magic” criteria], the Hollywood comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone seems relevant. Jim Carrey plays Steve Gray (known as “The Brain Rapist”), an “extreme” magician whose act is more endurance performance art than magic. The old school magicians in the movie are constantly asking themselves, “where’s the magic” in Gray’s act. In other words, how much of magic is crafted stage theatrics that produce wonder, and how much is un-staged, actual, Houdini-esque athletics (dislocating a shoulder, holding your breath, acrobatic extrication) that produce wonder? The mention of Houdini brings me back to ex-football-player art star Matthew Barney, whose films incorporate a combination of both stage magic (high-gloss production value) and athleticism (Barney himself actually doing physical stuff). Related topics include: the amount of theatrical acting involved in “reality” TV shows, and what percentage of pornographic sex is “real” (they are “actually” doing it) vs. staged (how much are they “actually” enjoying it).

I’m unwilling to dismiss endurance performance art as cliche (although much of it is), because endurance performance art is at least one art medium (along with land art, dance, and certain forms of socially engaged political art) where “stage crafted theatrics” (ARTifice, magic) intersect with “actual athletics” (real things which bodies in the world can actually do). Such “actual athletic” art might also be thought of as magick — “real” spells and curses that pragmatically cause bodies to change (as opposed to stage theatrics that only cause bodies to seem to change). Indeed, the best endurance performance art lies at the intersection of magic and magick.

Our work is based on several assumptions; first, that life is good, second, that two artists working together are better than one working alone, and third, that information is there for the taking. That said, we seek to create new works from both existing and original audio-visual information.

We are part of a long line of collage theorists extending from Kurt Schwitters to Kara Walker, from John Cage to Brian Eno.

Using the techniques of digital sound and video editing – both in the studio and in live performances – our work explores the history of cinema, the culture of the Internet, the richness of language, the pervasiveness of music and all the ways in which media intersect and interact to create new languages expressive of our time.

In 2001 Retold, we ripped a dvd of Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey and divided it up by dvd chapters. We then asked a variety of people to watch one chapter and recorded their retelling of the narrative. The original movie was then re-edited to match this retelling.